Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller

by Clifford Irving

  My stomach churned. “Coarse in what way, Mom?”

  “Her attitudes are common. She has that unfortunate manner of speaking. ‘He’s, like’… ‘She goes’ instead of ‘she said.’ I know that’s the way most children and young adults speak these days, but I don’t find butchery of the English language attractive. I don’t want to belabor this, darling.”

  “If you heard the way Simon speaks to his friends, Mom, you’d think he’d been brought up in a gutter by bums.”

  My mom looked startled, upset, annoyed, all at once. She twisted a little where she sat, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I’m going to teach Amy to speak better English,” I said.

  I didn’t know I intended to embark on that project until the words popped out of my mouth.

  “But, Mom, she does bathe. I know she bathes. She showers, I mean. And what’s ‘feminine hygiene’? How is it different from regular hygiene?”

  “Oh, Billy.” My mom’s eyes blurred as she reached out to me. “You’re so innocent…”

  “I like her a lot, Mom. I can’t tell you all the reasons why. That’s too hard. Didn’t you fall in love with Dad across a crowded room?”

  “Yes, I did… but surely you’re not telling me that you think you’re in love with Amy.”

  “I never said that. She’s my best friend. She’s a terrific person. She’s unhappy at home. I want to help her.”

  My mom hugged me.

  Chapter 14

  Cross-legged on the Berber carpet in the half-lotus position, my mom said, “We’ve rented a big victorian in Aspen for the Christmas holidays. The Russos had it last year, and they raved about it. Five bedrooms, a hot tub, and it comes with a four-wheel-drive Range Rover. Want to see pictures?”

  We were in the den, where we always gathered for family announcements. Simon and I sprawled in soft easy chairs and it felt real snuggly-buggly. My dad sat at his oak desk, editing another brief in the defense of National Nursing Homes, whose misdeeds were going to pay for the holiday in Aspen. He glanced up on occasion, smiling to assure us that he was paying attention.

  Simon said, “Cool,” bounced up from his chair, and ran up to his room to get on the telephone to his buddies.

  “I don’t want to go,” I said.

  My mom twisted from what seemed like an impossible position, and faced me, eyeglasses dangling. “Billy, this is a family holiday. Families need to reassert their ties. Everyone’s coming. Young and old, rich and poor—”

  “Who’s poor in this family, Mom?”

  “The boys and girls can snowboard at Buttermilk or ski with the grownups on Ajax. We’ll go dogsledding. Night snowmobiling. Your father found out that there are indoor climbing walls at the health clubs. We’ll get a temporary membership for you. Call it a Christmas present in advance.”

  Bribery. Under any other circumstances it would have worked.

  “Mom, our family holidays are always awful.”

  My dad’s two sisters couldn’t sleep under the same roof without a minimum of three walls between them; at night they snored, and during the day they scrapped. Nana, my dad’s mom, widowed and living in a Westchester County nursing home, needed her own TV to watch the soaps, and the volume had to be at the max. My Uncle Eli, an importer of Ping-Pong equipment from China, always established himself in front of the living room TV: “But just for those sporting events,” my mom explained, “where they use a ball, a puck, or a glove.” My cousin Lisa vomited if she smelled fish. My cousins Donna and David instructed everyone on what holistic remedies to take for whatever ailed them and what political opinions to hold in order to cure what ailed the world.

  “I want to be here with Amy over Christmas,” I said.

  My mom’s eyes snapped, like matches had been lit inside them.

  “Billy, you’re obsessed.”

  “Don’t argue with him, sweetheart.” My dad barely looked up from the desk, where his head was six inches from the legal pad. “Just tell him what’s going to happen.” He muttered, “I think I need a new prescription…”

  I did the mathematics in my head. “I’ll come for the five days that Uncle Bernie and the two of you will be there at the same time.”

  My dad was going to arrive late, after attending a Christmas march on the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee to urge clemency for a Death Row client. And my mom had explained that she would leave on New Year’s Day for meetings with Fortune magazine staff writers who were doing a story called “Women at the Helm.”

  My dad put down his fountain pen and leveled the Father Finger. “Billy, we are not prepared to bargain with you.”

  “So it’s the whole twelve days, or none at all? I choose none at all. You can’t force me to get on the plane.”

  “That is the brattiest thing I have ever heard come out of your mouth,” my mom said. She wheeled on my dad. “I repeat, obsessed.”

  In November the first Fruities commercial aired on Friends, and then on The Simpsons. On Thanksgiving morning I heard the big front door swing open. I smelled sheep.

  “Uncle Bernie!”

  He was in the front hall, brushing raindrops from the djellaba whose greasy brown wool had been sheared by Berbers in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. His beard looked thicker than ever. He filled the front hall and had to duck to avoid banging his head on the crystal chandelier.

  He looked up at me on the staircase.

  “You piss-ant, how many zillions are you making on that commercial? And—more to the point—where’s my cut?”

  That night, after my dad carved the turkey, and my mom ladled out the veggies and stuffing, and Simon scooped half of the cranberry sauce onto his plate, I explained to everybody that Uncle Bernie and I had come to a new understanding based on joint trusteeship of Iphigenia.

  “Because neither of us believes that he can own her,” I said. “We can just take care of her and enjoy her. Only Iphigenia can own Iphigenia.”

  This new understanding, I explained, required a new divvying up of the financial pie. “I did all the work on the Fruities commercial, which Uncle Bernie and I agree is worth half of the money. He’s responsible for bringing Iphigenia into the family. And I’m responsible now for taking care of her. So the other half we’ve agreed to split fifty-fifty. Which means we have to amend the trustee agreement about the money.”

  My dad gave us his lighthouse-beam smile that had charmed judges, juries, billionaires, even serial killers.

  “Very generous of you, Billy,” he said. “Although, with due deference to Bernard’s prior custody of the monkey, we were led to believe that you bought his interest from him for nine hundred dollars cash.”

  “Yes, but there’s more to it.”

  “The kid’s a con artist,” Uncle Bernie said. “He reeled me in like a fish.”

  This led to what diplomats call a frank discussion. My mother called her brother “an opportunist who never did an honest day’s work in his life.” My father accused him of trying to “swindle money that an eleven-year-old has earned through hard work, a concept that’s foreign to you.” Uncle Bernie in turn called his sister “a capitalist lackey” and described his brother-in-law as “lawyerly,” a word that on my uncle’s lips seemed like a blend of amoral and scrofulous.

  I think it’s cool when grownups lose their temper. It’s one of the few times they say what they truly, deeply think.

  My dad pushed his plate away, drank some red wine, and, settling back in his armchair at the head of the dining room table, explained that whatever we had decided was irrelevant, because the income from the commercial had been placed in an irrevocable trust.

  “Meaning, Bernard, that the trust cannot be amended. Otherwise, any time that I felt like buying a new model Mercedes, I could dip into the trust to do so That’s precisely why you create an irrevocable trust. So that the trustee, or the beneficiary, on a mere whim, or under pressure from a well-meaning relative who feels, shall we say, disenfranchised, can’t monkey with it. No pun intended
.”

  “You can’t tell me,” Uncle Bernie said, “that a smart lawyer like you isn’t able to figure a way around the language in a contract. If I hired you and paid you five hundred bucks an hour, you’d find a way.”

  “You oversimplify,” my dad replied. “And my hourly fee has gone up.”

  I piped up again. “The money’s mine, isn’t it?”

  My dad put the tips of all his fingers together, tapped them a few times, and then leaned forward toward me. “I just explained to you, Billy, about an irrevocable trust. Are you sure you understand what the word ‘irrevocable’ means?”

  “Impossible to revoke. ‘Firm and irrevocable is my doom.’ Shakespeare. But you told me, Dad, that you set it up in a way that you could invade the trust. As in, march aggressively into someone else’s territory. Didn’t you say you could do that?”

  His smile grew a trifle threadbare around the edges.

  “Yes, I did, but —”

  “Invade it,” I said.

  When I saw the look on his face, and then heard Uncle Bernie’s quick goatlike bray of laughter, I added, “Make it work, Dad. Please. I know you can do it.”

  I signed the paper on Saturday in front of my mom, who was a notary, and then on Monday the trust sold $37,500 worth of stock and shares in the Modern Age Green Fund. There was also a clause in the agreement that required Uncle Bernie to give me back the nine hundred in cash I’d given him in exchange for Iphigenia. “I insist on that,” my dad said.

  On behalf of the trust he cut a check for the correct amount to Bernard Michael Adler, who called me two days later and asked, “How often is justice done? Rarely, believe me. I owe you, Billy, and that’s a marker you can call in anytime. There’s a check in the mail to you for the nine hundred. It’s my girlfriend’s check—she’s a lawyer, too —because I don’t have a bank account yet.”

  The check arrived from someone named Ginger Casey, one of those fancy multicolored checks that showed birds flying over the ocean at sunset and said “Peace on Earth in Our Time” and it looked like toy money. When my mom got home that evening I told her I wanted to start a money market account and an investment account, because my savings account at the local bank paid a lousy three quarters of a per cent interest. The government had given banks a license to steal.

  My mom opened her eyes wide and began to breathe rapidly. “I’ll get you an application right away. My company’s money market fund is currently paying four and a quarter percent, which is above average. Stock funds have no guarantees — extremely high risk, Billy — although long-term you always win. Yes, the market looks strong. It will have to be a custodial account in my name or Dad’s, because you’re a minor.”

  “You mean I can’t pick the funds? That’s no fun.”

  “You can pick them. However, the custodian will have to make the actual buys.”

  “Can’t you buy Modern Age funds online?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Well, if I have the password for the account, how can they tell who’s doing it?”

  “You’re absolutely correct… but… well, why not? You’ll get a kick out of it, and it’s your money. You’ll follow my general advice, won’t you?”

  “Sure. Can I sign checks on the money market account?”

  She explained that only she could do that, assuming that she became the custodian. And why would I want to? I was investing the money, wasn’t I?

  “I just hate that I haven’t got the right. Why can’t a kid spend his own money on presents and stuff?”

  We were talking about a lousy nine hundred dollars.

  “I tell you what, Billy. You can’t sign the checks — that would be against the law. But I’ll sign a bunch of them and you can keep them and fill them out and use them whenever you feel like it. And the statements will come here to the house and you can study them, so you’ll make the investment decisions and feel in charge. Is that okay?”

  We shook on it. Not quite a golden handshake, but it was binding.

  She brought the papers home the next evening, already signed by her, with the choice of funds left blank. There was no minimum investment amount; that was another one of Diana’s principles that had made Modern Age so popular. I picked a couple of funds whose names I liked, put a check on the box that asked for an ATM debit card (I figured my mom had just forgotten to do that), endorsed Ginger Casey’s check, and mailed the package.

  A few weeks later the mail brought a book of serious-looking gray checks with my name and Diana Adler’s name as custodian, a preliminary statement, and two debit cards, one in my mom’s married name and a second unasked-for one in my name. Minor clerical error, I figured, so I took my card and stuffed it into a sock with my cash. Armed with the New York Times financial pages, I got out my calculator and figured out that my funds were up six and a half percent in one month. The next afternoon I biked over to a savings bank on Main Street and traded a paper bag full of bills for a cashier’s check. That came to almost seven hundred dollars. I mailed that to Modern Age with instructions on how to invest it.

  Money makes a lot of things possible that otherwise wouldn’t work. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

  Chapter 15

  I was eating a fudge sundae and Amy was spooning up a butterscotch sundae with chocolate swirl ice cream. We had biked along the back roads of the township until we’d wound up in the Candy Kitchen, a cosy eatery on Bridgehampton Main Street.

  “Ginette loves ice cream,” Amy said. “Mint chocolate chip is her favorite. Sometimes she buys a whole container and shares it with us.”

  She spoke about Ginette the way a girl speaks about a mother she loves. All right, I thought, that kind of love can go so deep that you can’t help it. You need to love your mother.

  “Has she bought you any ice cream,” I asked, “since the day she locked you in the closet and tried to kill you?”

  “She didn’t mean to kill me,” Amy said.

  “If Duwayne and I hadn’t come along, you might have bled to death.”

  “She would have come out and found me.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She told me when she saw the blood on the knife, she sobered up. She got really scared. She knew she’d done something bad. She wasn’t even sure what it was.”

  We biked back to Hedges Lane, and I brought out some videos and asked Amy which of them she’d seen. None.

  “Not even Charlie Chaplin? Modern Times?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  She flopped down on the carpet, cross-legged like my mom, only Amy was younger and could do it better. I put the video in the VCR, sat down next to her, and hit the remote.

  “What’s wrong with the color?”

  “Wait.”

  She started to chuckle as soon as Charlie was on the production line, tightening nuts and bolts, trying to keep up. She laughed hard when he used the wrench to tighten the boss’s nose. She shrieked when Charlie was hooked up to the feeding machine so that the workers didn’t have to stop for lunch, and the machine shoved a pie into his face. When someone belched in Charlie’s direction and he waved his hat to drive the smell away, she turned to me and said, “He’s kind of higher class, right? Just like you.”

  By the end of the movie, when Charlie was running away through the restaurant and pushing whole rows of chairs in the path of his pursuers, Amy was hysterical with laughter. “He’s so clever!” And then when the shack fell down around him and he and Paulette Goddard, his orphan girlfriend, leaned on a door and fell out into the pond, Amy screeched so hard that she had to jump up and dart to the bathroom.

  I paused the video.

  She came back, a little red in the cheeks. “I couldn’t help it,” she said.

  Paulette and Charlie were together in the shack, drinking out of tin cans and gnawing on a loaf of bread. Charlie went off to work at the factory — Paulette waved goodbye to him from the door of the shack.

  “I wish I lived there,” Amy said.

/>   “You and I could live in a house like that,” I said.

  “Would you work in a factory?”

  “No, I told you, I’d own a restaurant.”

  “And what would I do?”

  “You could get a job. You could be hostess in the restaurant. Study something, like computers. Or you could sit home and read or watch National Geographic videos. Fix up the house, make it look better. Swim in the pond if it got hot.”

  “Sounds nice,” she said. “Where’s this house?”

  “Could be a ranch somewhere.”

  She quieted down for the rest of the movie.

  “Want to watch another? I’ve got the Marx Brothers.”

  “I wet my panties laughing,” Amy said. “I had to wash them and leave them on a hook in your shower. Where’s the dryer?”

  I took her downstairs to the laundry room. I didn’t crack any jokes about her wetting her pants. No girl had ever said words like that to me before. You could say anything you wanted to a best friend.

  On a Friday in early December, on the steps of the middle school, in the gray afternoon light, Amy handed me a package wrapped in brown paper that looked as if it had been cut from supermarket bags. Some tape sealed the edges and a purple strip of ribbon was tied around it and ended in a bow.

  “Happy birthday, Billy.”

  I knew she had no money and I couldn’t imagine what she’d bought for me. It felt and looked like a hardback book.

  “Amy, you shouldn’t have done this.”

  “I wanted to.”

  I unwrapped the package. It was a hardbound notebook. On the cover she had printed in big red letters: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BILLY FROM AMY.” And then, in black letters and numbers, the date. I opened the notebook. It was full of drawings in crayon and colored pencil. They were drawings of Amagansett and East Hampton: the row of elms where Woods Lane meets Main Street, salt box houses on Bluff Road, the old Indian trail to Montauk, the windmill at the head of Main Street, Ashawagh Hall in Springs, and even a drawing of the middle school. On one page there was a drawing of me and on another a drawing of our house on Oak Lane. All the drawings had titles printed in crayon, like: “The Elm Trees On Woods Lane” and “Billy’s Beautiful House in Amagansett.”